Friday, August 10, 2007

"High Country Vista" by Something in Common

I stitched this piece while we were on vacation - in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. It will serve as our "remembrance" piece for this summer, since we saw bears and moose, and experienced the most beautiful scenery. I truly had a blast working on this one. The fabric is antique - I found it at an antique shop in Darby, Montana. It started out as an old piece of mosquito netting. In fact, there were two pieces, and each one was 66" long and about 35" wide. It's got some staining, but I think that it has character.

To the left is one of the pieces before I trimmed off the strings and buckles that were used when it was being utilized as mosquito netting.

To the right is what it looked like after I cut them all off.

It's a very fragile cloth - with large spaces between the threads. I found that I had to be very gentle when stitching on it, as any extra tension caused distortion.

The trees were fun, once I figured out the counting and placement of the long stitches. The beard of the mountain man was stitched with gray Whisper, and it looks fuzzier in real life than it does in the photo.

I like the "nubbins" and uneven thicknesses of the threads.

I thought I would hate doing Rhodes stitches, but it turns out that they're really easy and fun to do! But you can see that with this fragile cloth, it was difficult to do them. No matter how gentle I was, I still had lots of gaps caused by the pulling of the threads.